Too dark for chronological kiddies, The Fall goes after the child at the heart of old-fashioned movie grown-ups. Director/co-writer/-producer Tarsem Singh’s second feature gestated a decade-and-a-half, the final quarter of that in scrumptious eighteen-country shooting, plus other, interim years’ pieces done following worldwide commercial jobs. Along the winding way, this indie runs deeper while at the same time tipping its cap to exotic adventure and cowboy films of sixty years back and, emphasized in a hospital-projection scene, to the stuntmen and the early actors who did their own dangerous dirty work.

Starting 1908 or 1916, these stand-ins did what Mack Sennett admired, “any foolish stunt my psychopaths in the writing room could think up,” and in “Los Angeles Once Upon a Time -- 1915” Roy Walker (Lee Pace) lies without feeling or movement in his legs from a railroad bridge “gag” that will wind up cut from its movie, anyway. More than career and mobility, he broods the loss of his gold digger girlfriend to pampered, successful star Sinclair (Daniel Caltagirone).

In his Catholic hospital ward bed he is approached by fellow patient Alexandria (Catinca Untaru, in her début), who carries a wooden box of memorabilia under the arm that is not in a braced cast from a fall harvesting fruit with her Eastern European migrant farmworker family. From a chance remark about her namesake Alexander the Great (Kim Uylenbroek, who also plays a clinic doctor), and a screen visualization of his desert predicament, comes a promise to relate to her an “epic,” which means “long.”

Her recently learned English sometimes difficult, circulating freely among other patients and staff, including her favorite nurse, Sister Evelyn (Justine Waddell), Alexandria returns for continuation of the adventure. (For these scenes done in South Africa, Untaru and most all the cast and crew were kept believing that Pace actually was paralyzed.) Plot skeleton based on Bulgaria’s 1981 Yo Ho Ho, the backbone context develops along this Scheherazade line. Adjusting material to happenstance and the young listener’s questions and mood, the immobile storyteller builds a Columbia-Mascot-Republic-Universal serial, a revenge-and-love swashbuckler in fantastic landscapes, ancient cities, palaces and fortresses.

These pictorializations of warhorse derring-do are elastic enough to embrace mystic magic (Julian Bleach, in blackface with dreadlock wig and full false dentures; later a patient and a California fruit picker) and science in monkey Wallace and Charles Darwin (Leo Bill, also a hospital orderly) searching for the “Americana Exotica” lepidoptera. Abruptly dropping the Macedonian world-conqueror, the hammed-up tale begins anew on a deserted atoll with four, then five, castaways united in sworn hatred of Spanish tyrant Odious (also Caltagirone): Darwin, ex-slave Otta Benga (Marcus Wesley, who also delivers the hospital’s iceblocks), a turbaned Indian (Jeetu Verma, later a migrant fruit picker), explosives wiz Luigi (Robin Smith, doubling as a one-legged actor patient), and the pirate-outfitted Black Bandit (Pace).

Confused from one day to the next, the tale’s Bandit starts out Blue, Odious as French, “No, Spanish,” and the Indian from the subcontinent had a “squaw” wife and lived in a “wigwam” mansion. The evil soldiers’ uniforms are modeled after an X-ray technician’s protection, and maps and notes after Alexandria’s paper cutouts, while the avengers acquire the Bandit’s tagalong improbable daughter (Untaru) and love interest in Odious’ gold digger flower-petal fiancée Princess Evelyn (Waddell).

SPOILER ALERT

Behind the quest, escapes and attacks, lies darkness, for Roy’s aim is to use unwitting Alexandria to help finish his empty dead end of a life. Innocent though intuiting a sinister something, she foils his suicide, once unconsciously and, a second time, pleading for further adventures, through no fault of her own. Fearing him dead and gone, then witnessing his rage at not being so, she tries one more time, and fails and falls once again. Guilt now on top of self-pity, the teller of the tale pitilessly sets to kill off heroes and, symbolically, self. “I don’t like this story,” she cringes, “I don’t want you to die, don’t kill him!”

To Roy’s “it’s my story,” she insists, “it’s mine, too!” She is right; in literary and cinematic tales or dreams set in frames, those from that frame often merge with, indeed become, those in the supposed “non-real” middle. Thus, while some “fictional” adventure characters here are from Roy’s world or extempore the teller and listener’s shared one, others are exclusively from hers, each mind-picturing from his/her particular experience.

Final broadly shared laughter at 16 f.p.s. celluloid make-believe, and a smiling migrant family in Southern California orange groves, are happy enough but cannot fully coat a bitter aftertaste from falls and the descent to despair. The wackiness of this elaborate, not entirely tongue-in-cheek film, however, makes for wonder-filled moviegoing.

(Released by Roadside Attractions; not rated by MPAA.)